Thursday, March 22, 2018

A group of 100 French intellectuals has just published in the newspaper Le Figaro (March 19, 2018), its denunciation of Islamic totalitarianism. Among the signatories are some of the most distinguished historians, philosophers, professors, jurists, and journalists, in France, known to all, and representing political leanings from Left to Right. Among them are some ex-Muslims. Not a group easy to dismiss.

We are citizens of differing and often diametrically opposed views, who have found agreement in expressing our concern in the face of the rise of Islamism. We are united not by our affinities, but by the feeling of danger that threatens freedom in general and not just freedom of thought.

That which unites us today is more fundamental than that which will undoubtedly separate us tomorrow.

Islamist totalitarianism seeks to gain ground by every means possible and to represent itself as a victim of intolerance. This strategy was demonstrated some weeks ago when the SUD Education 93 teachers union proposed a training course that includedworkshops on state racism from which white people were barred.Several of the facilitators were members or sympathizers of the CCIF (French Collective Against Islamophobia) or the Natives of the Republic party. Such examples have proliferated recently. We have thus learned that the best way to combat racism is to separate races. If this idea shocks us, it is because we are Republicans.

We also hear it said that because religions in France are trampled on by an institutionalized secularism, everything that is in a minority — in other words Islam — must be accorded a special place so that it can cease to be humiliated.This same argument continues by asserting that in covering themselves with a hijab, women are protecting themselves from men and that keeping themselves apart is a means to emancipation.

What these proclamations have in common is the idea that the only way to defend the “dominated” (the term is that of SUD Education 93) is to set them apart and grant them privileges.

Not so long ago, apartheid reigned in South Africa. Based on the segregation of blacks, it sought to exonerate itself by creating bantustans (territories set aside for black South Africans) where blacks were granted false autonomy. Fortunately this system no longer exists.

Today, a new kind of apartheid is emerging in France, a segregation in reverse thanks to which the “dominated” seek to retain their dignity by sheltering themselves from the “dominators.”

But does this mean that a woman who casts off her hijab and goes out into the street becomes a potential victim? Does it mean that a “race” that mixes with others becomes humiliated? Does it mean that a religion that accepts being one among other religions loses face?

Does Islamism also seek to segregate French Muslims, whether believers or otherwise, who accept democracy and are willing to live with others? Who will decide for women who refuse to be locked away? As for others, who seemingly do not deserve to be protected, will they be held under lock and key in the camp of the “dominators”?

All of this runs counter to what has been done in France to guarantee civil peace. For centuries, the unity of the nation has been grounded in a detachment with respect to particularities that can be a source of conflict. What is known as Republican universalism does not consist in denying the existence of gender, race or religion but in defining civic space independently of them so that nobody feels excluded. How can one not see that secularism protects minority religions?

Jeopardizing secularism exposes us to a return to the wars of religion.

What purpose can this new sectarianism serve? Must it only allow the self-styled “dominated” to safeguard their purity by living amongst themselves? Is not its overall objective to assert secession from national unity, laws and mores? Is it not the expression of a real hatred towards our country and democracy?

For people to live according to the laws of their community or caste, in contempt of the laws of others, for people to be judged only by their own, is contrary to the spirit of the Republic. The French Republic was founded on the refusal to accept that private rights can be applied to specific categories of the population and on the abolition of privilege.

On the contrary, the Republic guarantees that the same law applies to each one of us. This is simply called justice.

This new separatism is advancing under concealment. It seeks to appear benign but is in reality a weapon of political and cultural conquest in the service of Islamism.Islamism wants to set itself apart because it rejects others, including those Muslims who do not subscribe to its tenets. Islamism abhors democratic sovereignty, to which it refuses any kind of legitimacy. Islamism feels humiliated when it is not in a position of dominance.

Accepting this is out of the question. We want to live in a world where both sexes can look at each other with neither feeling insulted by the presence of the other. We want to live in a world where women are not deemed to be naturally inferior. We want to live in a world where people can live side by side without fearing each other. We want to live in a world where no religion lays down the law.

I assume you all are lovers of free speech because you have come to Speakers’ Corner.

You might not understand all the fuss happening today around this speech. Honestly, I don’t understand it either.

My name is Martin Sellner. I am an Austrian patriot, and at the moment, I’m sitting in a detention cell in Colnbrook Bypass near Heathrow. My smartphone was taken and my girlfriend Brittany was separated from me. I currently don’t know where she is. We will be deported on Sunday.

Five minutes ago, they unlocked our cells and my fellow inmates are gathering in the prison wing. They are mostly illegals and eastern European criminals.

What brought me into this situation? What was my crime?

My crime was that I wanted to be here with you, to speak at Speakers’ Corner.

But let’s start with the beginning. I was invited by UKIP to present my movement at an event last Autumn. I represent Generation Identity — a patriotic European youth movement that is raising awareness about mass immigration and Islamisation.

Far-left people call us right-wing, people who want to shut free speech down call us ‘fascist’, and folks who hate their own culture call us ‘racist’.

In reality, we are just a group of young patriots fed up with the system, the mainstream press and lying politicians. We use peaceful activism to make our voices heard, and contrary to our friends on the radical left, who are probably swarmingyou right now, we never wear masks.

From Paris to Rome, from Vienna to London, we fight peacefully but without compromise for our freedom, our homelands, and our identity!

This is what I wanted to speak about in Autumn. But the conference was cancelled due to threats from the radical left. The venue would not take the risk. So they rescheduled it for March, this time keeping the venue secret — but again the terror of the left prevailed, and the venue dropped out.

But this time I did not want to let them win! It was about principles! (Also, our flightswere already booked.)

My last refuge was Speakers’ Corner. I remembered my mother telling me about that special place when I was a child. Itseemed almost magical to me. A place where everyone, without exception, could just stand on a box and start to speak to those who wanted to listen. I have always loved this tradition of Speakers’ Corner, which seemed very British to me.

But I came only to see that this tradition — the tradition of freedom of speech in the United Kingdom — is dead.

Your Country is blocking you from challenging ideas from the outside. This is a disgrace to our democracy!

I should be speaking in neat, warm a conference room right now, and you should be sitting in comfortable chairs. Instead, I’m in my cell and you are on the street in a standoff with the enemies of freedom of speech.

And this is very telling! Today there is a war going on for our freedom of speech. This war is being fought on the streets,by you!

Every man and woman showing her face today, standing shoulder to shoulder, is standing up against a new totalitarianismthat has been growing for far too long. You can be proud of yourself. You might not even agree with me on every point — you are simply giving a statement that I should have the right to speak my mind freely.

I would love to be among you now. They prevented me from it. They locked up the speaker, but I know that the speech willfind a way through the iron bars. It will find a way to you and you are going to hear what you government so desperately wants to protect you from.

Those words which they consider more harmful to you then rape gangs or terrorists who are let into your country again andagain.

I’m going to tell you something nobody has told you before. It’s the biggest, most obvious secret of our media our politicians and our powerholders: People of Britain, you are being replaced.

There has always been immigration in your history. People coming in, assimilating. But what’s happening today is different:You are being replaced by massive Muslim immigration.

You see it everywhere: in London, in Manchester, but also already in the little countryside towns. A big replacement is goingon.

And let me tell you: your politicians have no plan, no vision and no idea how to deal with the problems that come along. Problems like you have seen in Telford, Rotherham, and on Westminster Bridge.

All across Europe, there is a shadow hanging over our heads. The French are whispering about in the Metro, the Germans murmuring about it when they feel unwatched, Italians look left and right, and if nobody is listening they tell you: “I don’t feel at home anymore in my street. We are becoming foreigners in our own country.”

And again and again I hear: “We are not allowed to talk about it.”

And that’s the bizarre drama of the ‘Strange death of Europe’. We are being replaced, conquered by radical Islam, and we are now allowed to talk about it!

Dear Britons, defenders of free speech. Out of my cell in Colnbrook, I want to ask you something. Be honest and raise your hands.

Who among of you has ever been in the following situation: You grab a beer after work, or you are visiting your girlfriend’s parents for the first time, or you meet other children’s parents at school — and suddenly the conversation moves to politics: radical Islam, immigration.

Who of you in this very moment was faced with the decision between speaking his mind and facing problems, or complyingand staying silent?

Raise your hands and be honest.

I will not be able to see the results, but every single hand is too much. This amount of fear should not exist in a society. Speech that has social costs and severe consequences is no longer free. It has a price — and our Government and the Antifa are working everyday to raise that price.

No freedom of speech means no democracy. In front of our very eyes this country is becoming a tyranny, shutting all debatesabout immigration down, until demographics solves the issue by replacement.

People of the UK. I might be in a cell right now, but you all are in a cell. It’s the prison of fear and silence your governement and the PC tyranny has locked you in since the days of your childhood.

I ask you, I command you, break free!

Patriots of the UK: come out of the closet. Make your dissent visible by visible acts of resistance that inspire others. I know for certain that millions in the UK think like me. Those millions should be on the street now.

We need a coming out of the silent majority, or Britain is lost. We need a free, open and honest debate about immigration,Islam and demographics, so we can sort these problems out together.

And I know that the force is still in you. With your Brexit vote you stunned the world! The will and the life of the Britishnation is not broken.

Initially, I asked if freedom of speech is dead in the UK. You, every one of you who came today, is a living sign that the tradition of the UK is not dead! You are the livley tradition of your nation, saving its face before history.

People of the UK — remember who you are! Remember your glorious past, you are sons and daughters of knights, kings, explorers, philosophers and artists. Who is the sovereign in this country?

Is it big money?

The mainstream media?

The politicians?

It’s you — the people. You, the silent and invisible majority who said NO during Brexit. You can say NO again — no to Islamisation, no to mass immigration, and no to the great replacement.

And YES to your identity — yes to your security, yes to your heritage and the future for your children.

And all this is impossible without to freedom of speech.

I know, if these words will find their way to the UK and even to Speakers’ Corner, it will be victory for our cause.

If they did, and if you are hearing them now, I tell you: go further on that winning street. Don’t be afraid because we have anally that is unbeatable: Truth.

The battle, our battle for freedom of speech, has just begun, and Speakers’ Corner will become a symbolic place in thatstruggle.

When you go home know I want you to bring the spirit of Speakers’ Corner with you. Every single person who raised his hand because he could relate to this moment of fear, when he did not dare to speak his mind.

Promise me: Next time I will overcome my inner fear. Next time I will speak up!

Professor David S. Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, the groundbreaking and definitive study of America’s response to the Holocaust, passed away on March 14, in his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, after a lengthy illness. He was 89.

A private memorial ceremony will be held by his family. A public event commemorating Prof. Wyman’s life and legacy will be held by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in New York City, at a date to be announced.

Dr. Rafael Medoff, founding director of the Wyman Institute, said: “David was a brilliant scholar, a gifted speaker, an exceptional teacher, and a devoted friend. But above all, he was a person of extraordinarily fine character—a true ‘mensch’.”

Prof. Deborah Lipstadt once wrote: "I am convinced that had there been more Christians like David Wyman in the 1930s and 1940s, the history of this period would have been very different. He strikes me as one of the tzadikei umot ha'olam [righteous of the nations]."

Dr. Medoff added: “It is testimony to David’s greatness that the achievement of which he was proudest was not any of the numerous awards he received for his pioneering scholarship, or the many laudatory reviews of his books, but the fact that The Abandonment of the Jews contributed directly to the rescue of more than 800 Ethiopian Jewish refugees.”

The refugees were left stranded and starving along the Ethiopian-Sudanese border in early 1985, when an Israeli airlift operation was interrupted. Jewish activists, together with Congressman John Miller, gave copies of The Abandonment of the Jews to Vice President George H.W. Bush and his aides, pleading with them to “do now what we didn't do then." As a result, the U.S. sent a fleet of C-130 Hercules transport planes to rescue the refugees and bring them to Israel.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a research and education institute based in Washington, D.C. and chaired by the noted businessman and philanthropist Sigmund A. Rolat, was established by Prof. Wyman's colleagues in 2003.

***

David S. Wyman, the grandson of two Protestant ministers, was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1929, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in history, and from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in history.

From 1966 until his retirement in 1991, Prof. Wyman taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was the Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. Professor of History and twice served as chairman of the Judaic studies program. DuBois was a Treasury Department official who, in 1943, played a key role in exposing the State Department’s sabotage of opportunities to rescue Jews from the Nazis. When the university honored Prof. Wyman by allowing him to select the name of his professorship, he chose Josiah DuBois.

Prof. Wyman’s first book was the critically-acclaimed Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). He spent the next fifteen years researching and writing the sequel, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 (Pantheon, 1984).

Prof. Wyman often spoke about how difficult it was for him, as a Christian, to be confronted with the evidence of the meager response by American Christians to news of the Holocaust; sometimes he “cried for days” and had to take a break from his research. As he explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education, he "had been brought up wth the belief that at the heart of Christianity is the precept that, when people need help, you should provide it."

Prior to the publication of The Abandonment of the Jews, the widespread assumption among the American public was that there was little or nothing the Roosevelt administration could have done to save Jews from the Holocaust. Prof. Wyman’s meticulous research demonstrated that there were, in fact, many ways the U.S. could have aided European Jewish refugees, without interfering with the war effort or undermining America’s immigration laws. He documented how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his State Department suppressed news about the Holocaust and ignored opportunities to rescue refugees.

The Abandonment of the Jews quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list, and reviewers were nearly unanimous in their acclaim. "We will not see a better book on this subject in our lifetime," Prof. Leonard Dinnerstein concluded. Prof. Hasia Diner wrote that Abandonment "systematically demolishes often repeated excuses for inaction.” Thirty-four years later, The Abandonment of the Jews is still the gold standard in its field.

The Abandonment of the Jews won the Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, the Ansfield-Wolf Award, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other accolades. It went through seven hardcover printings and multiple paperback editions, as well as editions in German, French, Hebrew, and Polish, selling a total of more than 150,000 copies worldwide.

The book attracted considerable interest on Capitol Hill, as well. Twice in 1985, Prof. Wyman was invited to address groups of members of Congress. U.S. Senator Paul Simon (D-Illinois) devoted an installment of his weekly syndicated column to The Abandonment of the Jews, which he characterized as "one of the most powerful books I have ever read."

During the decade following the book’s publication, Prof. Wyman was a featured guest on numerous major radio and television shows, including Nightline with Ted Koppel, the Today Show with Jane Pauley, and the Larry King Show. He delivered more than 400 lectures to synagogues, churches, civic organizations, and educational institutions, and even those represented only the fraction of the invitations that his teaching load enabled him to accept. In his lectures, Prof. Wyman often would unfurl, accordion-like, the four foot-long government form that a would-be immigrant was required to fill out in order to be considered for a visa to enter the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

Prof. Wyman was deeply proud that his book not only educated Americans about their country’s response to the Holocaust, but helped ensure that another persecuted Jewish community would not be abandoned. The role that The Abandonment of the Jews played in the 1985 U.S. airlift of more than 800 Ethiopian Jews was widely acknowledged in the news media at the time. Wolf Blitzer, who was the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, wrote: "Today's direct and very active cooperation by the U.S. government in helping to rescue Ethiopian Jews is in marked contrast to the documented abandonment of European Jewish refugees before and during World War II ... [which has been] well-documented in David S. Wyman's recently published book, The Abandonment of the Jews.”

Vice President Bush subsequently sent Prof. Wyman a handwritten note of thanks for inspiring the rescue mission. The note is proudly displayed in the Wyman family home in Massachusetts.

During a visit to Israel in 1988, Prof. Wyman's hosts took him to an orphanage to meet some of the children who had been rescued in the airlift; he described it as one of the most moving experiences in his life. In 2008, Prof. Wyman visited an Israeli air force base, together with Dr. Rebecca Kook, Astra Temko, and Nili Kook, the daughters and widow, respectively, of Holocaust rescue activist Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson). There they met Major-General Amir Eshel, who was involved in the 1985 airlift operation, and Moshe Gadaf and Ami Farradah, who, as eight year-olds, were among the Ethiopian Jewish children who were rescued. The poignant ‘reunion’ of the former child refugees, the Israeli general who helped save them, and the American historian whose book made the rescue possible, was truly unforgettable.

Prof. Wyman was also the coauthor, with Rafael Medoff, of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (The New Press, 2000); editor of America and the Holocaust (thirteen volumes of the documents used in The Abandonment of the Jews, published by Garland in 1990); and editor of The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Most recently, he contributed a chapter to Dr. Medoff’s 2018 book, Too Little and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust.

Prof. Wyman’s wife, Midge, who assisted him in his scholarly work, passed away in 2003. The Wyman Institute joins with their children, Teresa and Jim, and the other members of their family, in mourning his passing.